Web Services applications are web-based enterprise applications that use open, extensible markup language (XML)-based standards and transport protocols to exchange data with calling clients. Using Web Services, developers can build distributed applications with an eye toward interoperability as the priority. Perhaps the most popular architectural approach to service-based infrastructures is organizing computational resources as a broad collection of individual services that can be flexibly combined into applications.
One of the challenges associated with such an approach is the management of horizontal complexity (e.g., because there are many nodes or computing devices in a Web Services framework, and many interconnections and overlapping applications). Tasks such as performance analysis, debugging and program understanding thus become more complex in a large Web Services configuration.
Thus, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for extracting and visualizing execution patterns from Web Services configurations.